Photoshop Like a Professional - Creating Expert-Level Shadows

1. Introduction: Hi. Welcome to my course. My name is Steven. I'm a photo shop artist and graphic designer. I also have around 10 years of teaching experience and I've written tutorials for numerous websites and publications. I like to explore different techniques in Photoshop to create photo manipulations. Using these techniques, I can take different photos and combine them into a believable scene. Today I wanted to share one of those techniques with you in this course will be learning how to create expert level shadows. Now, this is a similar technique that traditional artists and painters use. We're just taking that technique and the concepts and translating into Photoshopped. We'll explore shadows through observation, and I'll provide step by step instructions on how to accurately recreate those shadows in Photoshopped. After taking this course, you understand the importance of shadows, how to identify each one and how accurately recreate them. In Photoshopped, the end result will make your scenes more realistic. As you finish your projects, please post them in the gallery. I'd love to see how they turned out. Also, I want to point out that while some of these techniques are a little more advanced, anyone with a basic understanding of Photoshopped should be able to follow along. That means if you're a beginner or advanced user, you'll get something out of this course. Well, I'm excited to bring this course to you, so let's get started. 2. Shadow Overview: before we jump into Photoshopped, I want to take a moment to look at some real world examples of shadows. Now this part is important because we'll spot the different properties that shadows can have. An understanding these properties will help us create realistic shadows in our scenes now. Years ago, before he got into graphic design, I was three D artist. Now, during that time, I studied a lot of shadows and how different lighting scenarios affected those shadows. Knowing how is seen is lit can tell us a lot about what shadows we can expect. For example, think about direct sunlight. A scene lit by direct sunlight will produce a dark shadow. A scene lit by studio lights and soft boxes may produce a much softer shadow. When trying to composite an image into another scene. It's important to observe what shadows already exist in that scene so you can accurately match them. Getting this step wrong is going to affect the believability of your image. That's probably the first important point about shadows and general shadows should match the shadows and you're seen. Or more specifically, shadows should match the existing lighting in the scene de means of your light is coming from the left. The shadow is gonna be on the right. If the light sources high, the shadow is gonna be short, as opposed to a light source. That's low. The shadow is gonna be longer. There are actually three different types of shadows that will be observing. Each has their own set of properties and we'll go through each one. The three types of shadows are the direct shadow, which is also known as a cast shadow, the ambient shadow and the base shadow, which is sometimes referred to as the contact shadow. Over the next few lessons, we'll take a closer look at each one and see what important observations we can make. 3. Direct Shadow Explained: Let's take a look at the shadows in this scene. The first thing we noticed is the most common shadow, and that's the direct shadow. This is the shadow that the object cast onto the ground from the main light source, which happens to be off the screen. There are a few observations we can make about the direct shadow, all of which will come into play when we start creating them ourselves. The most important observation that we can make is that different lights can affect the shadows in different ways. For example, the brightness of the light and the distance that the light is to the object are all gonna affect how the shadow appears. Next, we can see that the shadow is generally gonna mimic the shape of the object. Now, as I turned the cup, the shape of the shadow changes. It is important to notice that based on the position of the light source and the camera, the shape of the shadow may not always mimic the shape of the object. Exactly. I'll address that point in more detail once we jump into Photoshopped. If we had another light source to the scene, we can observe that a second direct shadows visible, so we know that there could be multiple direct shadows based on the number of lights in the scene. Another observation that we can make is that the shadow is going to appear sharper and darker, the closer it is to the base of the object. In contrast to that, it's gonna appear lighter and softer. The father it is away from the object again. This has to do with the light source. This effect won't be as noticeable with something like direct sunlight, but it might be even more noticeable with something like a soft box. The last observation, and probably the most commonly overlooked, is that the shadow has color that is to say that it's never pure black. The color of the shadow actually depends on the color of the light. Now, sometimes we may not always have that information, in which case I'll find another shadow on the scene to sample color from or if there are no shadows. I just use a dark blue as my default shadow color. Let's recap what we just learned about drug shadows. Different types of lights will produce different shadows. The shape of the object will be mimicked in the shadow, but it's not an exact shape. There could be multiple direct shadows. The shadow is darker and sharper near the base. In contrast, the shadow ist lighter and softer, the farther it is away from the base. And lastly, shadows have color. In the next lesson, we'll take a look at ambient shadows. 4. Ambient Shadow Explained: the next shadow that we can observe is the Ambien shadow. This is the shadow created by all the other lights and are seen that is not coming from the direct light. Basically, as light hits our object or any other surface, really, it bounces around to other surfaces. Lighting those. I could have difficulty reaching some areas, such as corners made by different surfaces or objects. This results in the appearance of a soft shadow, which is known as the Ambien shadow. This could be a tricky shadow to understand, but it also happens to be the one that adds the most realism to your scene. Let's take a look at this image. Notice how there's no direct shadow. That's because there is no direct light source. But we can still clearly see our object because there's enough ambient light in this room to bounce around in light or seen if we take a closer look, we could see that there are some darkest spots around the object where the light doesn't quite reach. I mentioned earlier that I used to work as a three D artist Well, in three D. This is known as ambient occlusion, which is just a fancy way of saying ambient light that is being blocked by our object. Now, this might be hard to get used to spotting, but after this lesson, you should be able to easily pick up on these shadows. Let's take it even closer. Look. Okay. We know the ami and shadows are the soft shadows around her object. I'm gonna sample color over here on the ground and watch. When I compare it to a color closer to our object, you can see that the color closer to her object is actually darker. This is where the ambient light was blocked by our object. This is the Indian shadow right here. I'm gonna adjust the levels really quick, and this is just gonna make the shadows darker. And now we can clearly start to see the ambient shadow around the object. So what could be observed from ambient shadows? Well, unlike direct shadows, ambient shadows tend to be very soft and very faint. They appear around the base of the object or wherever the object is close to another surface. Now let's take another look at that observation in action. Watch as I move this cup closer to the wall. Nor is how we can start to see a new shadow forming on the wall as the cup gets closer. That's our Ambien shadow. Lastly, similar to direct shadows, ambient shadows also have color. As a side note, you could experience ambient shadows wherever you are right now. If you're in a room, just look at the corners of the room and notice how the corners appear a little darker than the rest of the walls. The existing light in the room is bouncing off the walls, but it has a difficult time getting into those corners, causing an ambient shadow. Ambient channels are gonna be one of the trickier shadows that we encounter, but I'll share some tips and tricks on how to deal with these shadows. Once we get into Photoshopped in the next video, we'll take a look at base shadows. 5. Base Shadow Explained: the final shadow that we're going to observe is the base shadow. And this is the shadow that's created where our object is contacting the ground, which is why it's often called the contact shadow. This shadows often represented by a fine thin shadow right at the base of our object, which helps ground our object to the scene. It gives us that visual cue that are object is resting on the ground plane. Here's some observations that we can make about the base shadow. It tends to follow the shape of the objects base specifically where it's making contact with the ground. To illustrate this, I'm gonna remove the object to reveal what would be the base shadow. As we can see, the shadow is the same shape as the cup, where it's in contact with the ground, an object and have multiple based shadows. It's gonna have one at each point where it contacts the ground. Let's take a look at this toy car. We know that the tires are the only thing making contact with the ground. Therefore, we conclude that this toy will have four base shadows, one for each tire, and we can see how this looks if I just show the base shadows, but remove the car and any other shadows in the scene, similar to direct shadows and ambient shadows. Bay shadows also have color, and lastly, I would make one more observation much. What happens to the base shadow as I lift up this cup? With the cup lifted only a few centimeters above the surface, we no longer have a base shadow, but instead we have an Ambien shadow. We can observe that there is a clear relationship between base and ambient shadows. Understanding how these shadows interact will better help us recreate them in photo shop. Now that we've learned about the three different shadows in a scene, let's put that knowledge to practice. Follow along with me over the next few lessons and we'll jump into photo shop and I'll show you some tips and tricks on how to create those shadows. 6. Transition into Photoshop: over the past several videos, we learned about the nature of shadows and how they behave. We learned that there are three major shadow types. The direct shadow, which is the shadow casted by the direct light source. The ambient shadow, which are the subtle shadows caused by the bounce light in a scene, and the base shadows, which are the shadows formed at the point of contact an object has with any surface. Now, if you haven't watched those videos, I highly encourage you go back and do so. It'll give you a strong foundation on the different types of shadows and give you an understanding of why we're going to be making some of the decisions we do when we go build the shadows. Now I want to share something that I tell all my students. There are 101 way is to do the same thing in Photoshopped. Some are more effective and more efficient than others, But knowing multiple ways to do the same thing will give you an advantage in photo shop. Now, I would love to say that it takes three simple steps to build any shadow, but it's not that easy Sometimes it depends on the different types of shadows you want to build and how realistic you want to get in this next section. I'm gonna show you several different approaches on how to build each of the three shadows, and I'll be taking you through my decisions so you can better understand why I'm making the choices I'm making. I think this insight will be really valuable, and hopefully you'll let a few different techniques along the way as a reminder. The following videos do require a basic understanding of Photoshopped. Now we will be covering some advanced techniques, but anyone with a basic understanding of photo shop should be able to follow along. Let's jump right in. 7. Creating Direct Shadows in Photoshop: Okay, Now that we're in photo shop, we're gonna take everything that we learned and put it into practice. I want to first point out that we're working in a scene that has two layers. It has a background layer, and it has a mug layer with a mug that's already cropped out for us. Normally, I would take a look. The scene, find existing shadows. This scene doesn't have an existing shadows, so we can pretty much build whatever we want. Another thing I want to point out is that we do see some light highlights on the left side of the mug here. So we know that there is a light source off to the left side that's gonna give me some clues that I need to build my shadow on the right side of my mug. So let's go ahead and start building the direct shadow and see what that looks like. Now we did learn that the direct shadow does use the same or similar shape as our object. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start by duplicating our mug layer, and I'm gonna do that by holding down option or halt. And then dragging out a copy of this object. Now, the first thing I want to do is rename this. It's always good practice to rename your layers. So we rename it Direct Shadow. And now we can go ahead and change the color of this layer to mimic a shadow color. We can do that by double clicking the layer, and that's gonna bring up the layer styles panel. I'm gonna go over and select color overlay and I'm gonna come over here, select this watch, and this is gonna bring up the color picker and I'm going to select a dark blue color something like a midnight blue And that's going to be my shadow color. I hit OK and select. Okay, again, The next step is optional. I don't really want to work with a layer style. I actually want to flatten this to my layer so I could do that by right clicking the layer and going down to rast Arise layer style. All that's gonna do is compress that layer style and flatten it to that layer. I'm gonna go ahead and take my direct shadow and move it two below my mug layer that just allows me to position my shadow underneath my mug. So that appears to be casting from my mug. The next step is to transform our shadow. We're gonna do that using command T or controlled T on the PC, and that's gonna bring up our transformation handles. I can use the different handles to rotate or skew mind mug. And if I actually grab handle while holding command or control, I have the ability to skew my shadow. So let's go ahead and position are shadow. That would make it a little bit longer. That looks pretty good. Let's go and move the base a little bit. And I think that looks good. I'm gonna go ahead, hit, enter to commit the transformation and taking a look at the base. I can see that it doesn't quite line up. Let me zoom in here a quick way for me to line up the shadow is to use my arrow keys, and that's just gonna nudge my layer around until I get it just right. And I think that looks pretty good. All right, so the next step I'm going to apply a blend mode to our shadow layer, and that's just going to blend the shadow into the background layer. This is especially useful if we have some type of texture in the background. In order to do that, I'm gonna go with my layers panel and go up to this box here that says normal and select that right now we can see that our blend mode is set to normal. I'm gonna go down and click, Multiply. Alternatively, we can use linear burn. Linear burn is similar to multiply it just a little darker, a little richer. But often times I found multiply works for most scenarios and what that's gonna do, it's gonna blend those pixels into the background layer. We don't see much now because we are working on white, but it's always a good step to change your blend mode. The next step I want to do is to reduce the opacity. Right now, the shadow appears to dark, so I'm going to lighten up a little bit. And my goal here is to actually lighten it up to a point where I think the shadow will be the darkest. What I mean by that is we know that a shadow can change in darkness from the base of the shadow to the top of shadow. That is to say that a shadow will be darker toward the base, and it might be lighter toward the top of the shadow the farther away it gets from the base . When I adjust capacity, I'm going to make it as dark as I think it would be the darkest which is near the base. And I think something like 56% will work just fine. Looking at my shadow, I could see there's one main issue, and that's this handle right here. Looking at my mug. I can see that the handle probably wouldn't cast a shadow that looks like that. So this is the point. We're gonna have to manipulate our shadow to make it appear how we think it would cast onto the ground. This part can be a little creative. It's just a guessing game. But I can pretty much assume that this handle is not gonna be on this side. It potentially could be sticking out on the side a little bit, if at all. I'm gonna go ahead and assume that the light sources behind the mug and the mug it's blocking the handle itself, so we probably won't see the handle casted. It also will go ahead and remove the handle all together. Now I'm gonna show you two ways to do this. The first way is probably the quickest way. And that's the using eraser tool. So if I press e to bring up the eraser tool, I could go ahead and start racing, But we noticed that there Racer is too soft. So I'm gonna undo that to make the eraser harder. I can actually press a keyboard shortcut shift and left and right brackets. The shift in right bracket is going to make it harder shift and left bracket is gonna make it softer. It's all press shift and right bracket a couple times until the eraser is hard and then we can see that it looks pretty good. So let's go ahead and zoom in, and I'm gonna go ahead in the race this handle. But instead of getting some wavy lines, I'm gonna do this a little more precise on a press commands you to get back, and I'm going to select an area right near where I want to erase by clicking my eraser tool ones and then moving my cursor to another spot that I wanted to race and holding down shift . And when I click the Eraser tool again, it's going to you race everything in between those two points. So let's do that again. I'm gonna move my cursor tool over here and click the race. Then I'm gonna hold shift and move my cursor to this side of the handle and click again, and that's going to raise everything in a straight line. So let's go ahead and get rid of that part. And there we go. There is our shadow. Now I'm gonna undo that, and I want to show you a different technique. This next technique is actually my preferred technique because it is more precise, and that's using the pen tal. So I'm gonna select the pencil and where a zoom in, I'm going to plots and points and you can see that I can drag out the handles to make the line conform to the contours of the shadow. Let's go ahead and sweep it around here, and essentially what I'm doing is just making a selection around the handle. If I look closely, I can see some areas here where I can see that white area of the background show through. So I'm gonna fix that by holding down control and selecting this handle, and I can drag it to position it more precisely. So let's go ahead and put it there. I'll move this one over here, and I think that looks pretty good. Now all I have to do is right Click in the middle of my path and go to make selection. And that's gonna convert the path into a selection once I click, OK, and then I can press command or control X to get rid of that handle. And there we go. We have a nice looking shadow for our mud. There's still a little more work that we can do with this. We've made the observation earlier that the shadow is doctor near the base and lighter toward the top. The farther away it gets on the base and there's a couple ways to do this. I'm gonna show you two different ways the first way. This is a destructive technique, meaning that I'm gonna actually manipulate the pixels on this layer. So if I ever wanted toe make a change, I'd have to rebuild the shadow. But it is a quick way. And that way is to use the eraser tool. I'm going to press G to bring up my eraser, and I'm gonna press shift and left bracket, and that's gonna increase the softness of my eraser. I'm also gonna press right bracket to increase the size of my eraser. We get this nice effect where the shadow appears to disappear the farther away it gets from the base. Now, this is a little too much, so I'm gonna undo that. And we can make this effect a little softer by going up to our top menu bar and going to a pass iti and bringing the opacity down. Now, what I'm doing is I'm actually selecting the word opacity, and I'm using my cursor descriptive values. So I'm gonna set it to something small, like 13%. And now watch what happens when I sweep across the shadow. It gets lighter, but just barely. So I'm gonna do that a couple times toward the top and there we go. It looks pretty good. Now, I'm gonna do this because I want to show you a second technique and this technique is what's considered a nondestructive technique. That means that when we apply the technique, we can make changes to it at any time or get rid of it without having to rebuild our shadow . The way this works is that I'm gonna need to create a layer mask. I'm gonna do that by going over to my layers panel and selecting this icon down here, which is going to add a layer mask. And we can see that up here on our direct shadow layer that a new layer mask thumbnail was added. So with a new layer mask added, I'm gonna go over to my tool bar. I'm gonna slap the Grady int tool. Now, before I use this, I wanna make sure that we have the right colors we're working with. I'm gonna go up to the top and select the Grady Int icon, and that's gonna bring up my editor. I'm gonna confirm that I have the 1st 1 here selected, which is the foreground to background radiant, and I'm a click. OK, What this is going to do is allow me to paint a black toe white radiant across my scene and the way a layer mask works is that it uses black and white colors to affect the visibility of my layer. So pure black is going to be completely invisible and pure white is going to be 100% visible. As I draw a black toe white radiant across my shadow will expect to see that the start of my Grady int We'll hide the shadow completely. And the end of my Grady int, which is near the base of the cup, would reveal the shadow completely. And there you go. You can see how that looks. Now, that's a little too exaggerated. So I'm gonna do that. And I'm going to actually start my Grady int way off to the right over here and then drag it in. And then now we can see that we have the same effect. That's a little more subtle, Okay? And the last thing we need to do for the shadow to be complete is to give it a little bit of a blur toward the top of the shadow. Before we can do this, what will need to do is go back to our layers panel and make sure we have the right thumbnail selected currently, if we look at the layers panel, we do see that we have this white selection box around the layer mask thumbnail, we need to make sure that we have our pixel layer selected. So we're going to select the thumbnail just till left of that. And we can see that now that white highlight boxes around our picks a layer. Now, if I go over to the toolbar and select the Blur tool and before we begin, I'm gonna go up to my top menu bar and make sure that the setting is pretty low. I'm gonna take it down to about 23%. And what the blur two allows me to do is to paint over my image and anywhere on painting It's gonna actually learn. So I'm just keep sweeping back and forth clicking to make to blur my shadow On the more I click, the more it blurs. And there we go. It looks like we have a pretty convincing direct shadow. On the next video, we'll take a closer look at adding the base shadows 8. Creating Base Shadows in Photoshop: the next shadow will be creating is the base shadow. And remember that the base shadow is going to be that thin shadow that occurs where our object meets the ground. The first thing I need to do is determine what that shadow shape looks like. And I can pretty much guess that it's going to be a circle or an ellipse shape right here at the base. So the first thing I'm going to do is go up to my lips marquee tool and select that, and I'm gonna zoom into my object and make a selection around the base. Now, this selection will end up being are based shadow. So I'm going to try to get it as precise as possible. A couple things I'm noticing is my lips tool isn't exactly lining up perfectly with the contours of the mug. So I'm going to use a trick here and go up to select and transform selection. What that allows me to do is use the transformation, handles around a selection so I can position it more precisely. So I'm just gonna go ahead and make some changes before I commit transformation. I think this is looking pretty good. So I'm gonna hit enter to commit the transformation. And I'm gonna press, command or control C on the PC in command or control V to paste that selection into a new layer. And when I drag it out, we can see that we have our base shadow. Now I'm gonna follow the same steps we did with the direct shadow, and that's to go over to the layers panel. And the first thing I want to do is rename this. I'm gonna rename this to be a shadow. And now I can change the color by double clicking the layer, going to color overlay and by default, it should show up as the last color we selected. And this is that midnight blue color that we selected for the direct shadow. So we'll go ahead and use it again for our base shadow. I'm gonna hit OK, and just like with the other shadows, I do want to turn this blend mode to multiply. The last step is to drag it below. Are Mugler okay? Now you can see that we can position our shadow underneath the mug. However, before I do that, I do want to give this a subtle amount of blur. So in order to do that, I'm gonna go up to filter, blur and blur more, and that's just gonna give me a subtle amount of blur. Sometimes I found that it's helpful to add just a little bit more blur. The more you work with the shadows, the more you'll kind of get an idea what works better. In this case, I think we can go a little stronger with the Blur. So I'm gonna reapply the last filter used. And I could do that really quickly by going up to filter and blur more. This top menu item right here will always show you that last filter use. So it's like that. And as you can see, we've added just a little bit more blur. I think that looks good. So what? Position this right under the base layer. And I'm gonna use my arrow keys to nudge it into position. Now, this looks pretty good, but I see some inconsistencies with the shadow. For example, right here, it doesn't look like the Shadow is sticking out as much as I would like it to. So the last thing I can do to tweak. This is to press, command or control t to bring up the transformation handles for this layer and then just use the modifier keys to make some changes. I'm going to stretch this out just a little bit, and then let's nudge this back into position. Well, maybe bring in the sides a little bit and I'm gonna go ahead and hit enter to commit the transformation. And I think that does it. That looks pretty good. Now that we've added the base shadow. The last shadow that we need to add is the Ambien shadow, and we'll take a look at that in the next video. 9. Creating Ambient Shadows in Photoshop: the last shuttle will create is the ambient shadow. This can also be the trickiest shadow to get right and may take some experimentation. Now, a trick to creating the Ambien shadow is to start with the base shadow. I'm gonna do that by pressing Option or Ault to drag out a copy of the base shadow. I'm gonna go ahead and rename this to Ambient Shadow. And I noticed that the ambient shadow has the color overlay effect applied. So I'm gonna go ahead and right click this layer and go up to Rast Arise layer style That's just gonna permanently apply that effect so we don't have to worry about it. Okay, Now we can go ahead and edit this shadow. Now I'm going to use a technique that actually combines two different blurring effects. And I have found this to be very effective. The first is a motion blur. I can access that by going to filter, blur motion blur. Now, motion Blur is just gonna blur my layer in a linear path at any angle that I set. And I really want this to follow the same angle that my ellipses on. So I'm gonna go ahead and reduce the angle to a smaller amount. And 4% actually looks pretty good. We can see that it is following my lips. I'm going to increase the distance just a little bit. And I think that looks pretty good. I'm a click, OK? And to finish the shadow up, the next blurring effect will add is the box blur. I'm gonna go to filter, blur box Blur. Now, I do want to point out Gaussian Blur is also acceptable. But I found that box blur tends to give you a little bit more of a realistic lens blurring effect. So I'm gonna go ahead and click Box Blur, and we'll just increase the settings until we get a nice feathered shadow. And I think that looks pretty good, so I'll click. OK, so now I'm gonna move this shadow underneath our mug and then I'm gonna use the arrow keys just toe fine tune its positioning. I think that looks pretty good. A couple other things we can do to finish this shadow up is to go over to the layers panel and make sure that we have a shadow set to multiply. And then we're gonna reduce the opacity. Right now, it is pretty strong. And by reducing the opacity, we can make this much more subtle. So I'm gonna start. My normal process is to start with zero and actually work its way back up. I think I think that's pretty good. We have it set to 49%. Now, Watch what happens when I turn off the ambient shadow. We can see a drastic change and how that shadow effects are seen. I'm gonna turn the shadow back on. So I still think that this might be a little too flat and often times I found that it's more realistic if we build up our shadow effect using multiple ambient shadows. So I'm going to add a second ambient shadow. I'm gonna do that by dragging my ambient shadow layer onto this new layer icon and that's gonna create a copy. Let's go out and rename this I'm gonna rename it to go to And now I can go back to my scene and I want this shadow to be a lot larger than the first Shadows. So I'm gonna do that by pressing command or control t on the PC to bring up my transformation handles. And by pressing option or Ault, I can actually grab a corner handle and expand the size of the shadow from the center. So we're gonna go actually really large. I think they're looks fine. And I'm gonna hit enter to commit my transformation. Now, the next thing I need to do is reduce the opacity of the shadow. I'm gonna go back to my layers panel and go to a passage e and just move this down until it nice and subtle Let's start with zeros. Work its way back up I think 19% that works And there we go. We have our shadows The last thing I'm gonna do just for organization is I'm gonna click on the top Shadow layer, which is the ambient shadow, too. I'm gonna go down to my last shadow, which is the direct shadow and I'm gonna hold shift and click and that's gonna select all my layers at the same time. Now if I press command or control G, that's going to group all of my layers I'm a double Click this and rename this shadows And now if I toggle the visibility we can see how the shadows are affecting our scene. So here is the before and after we've added the shadows, and that's it. Those are the three shadows that give your scene that realistic look. In the next videos, we're gonna take a look at some different situations that might pop up and some additional techniques on how to apply the right shadows to those scenes. 10. Shadow Demo - Overhead Lighting Scenario: Here's a scene that demonstrates a unique lighting scenario that we're gonna try to recreate. You'll notice our light is coming from a top down angle. Now, in this scene, when we do create the shadows, I'll be working relatively fast. This is the point of this tutorial is to show you the process I would use to create a shadow like this. We're gonna start with a blank scene and we're gonna use what we've learned in the previous videos to start building out these shadows. The first shadow will create is the direct shadow. Now, since our light sources directly above our object, we can't really use the objects shape as a starting point. Instead, we'll need to draw out the direct shadow from scratch. I'm gonna show you a little trick that helps me. I like to use guides. I'm gonna show my guide layer here. What I've done is I've marked a guide at all the major contours of this object. And now what I could do with my brush tool is I could start drawing in the shadow. The first thing I want to do is to make sure that I am using a shadow color, and it looks like we already have a decent color selected till will stay with that and on a new layer, I'm gonna draw an outline of our figurine from top down perspective. The guy didn't help me identify the major contours, and this is what the final Shadow looks like. Now, I'm gonna go ahead and get rid of my guides, layer, because I don't need that anymore. And then while I'm in the layers panel, I'm gonna go ahead and double click the direct shadow layer just so I can rename this to Direct Shadow. And now I'm gonna make sure that it's set to multiply and I want to move my direct shadow layer underneath the figurine layer. So back in my campus, I'm gonna position the direct shadow layer underneath my figurine. I need to ask you the shape so that it fits the correct perspective. And I could do that by pressing command or control t to bring up the transformation handles . I'm gonna ask you this shape and fitted underneath our elephant, and I think that looks pretty good. I'm gonna press enter to commit the transformation and now I'm gonna go back to my layers panel, and I'm gonna make sure that this layer is set to multiply. And then I'm going to reduce the opacity to something like 10%. That looks pretty good. The last thing I wanna do with the Shadow is to give it a slightly feathered edge. And I'm gonna do that with the box blur filter. I'm gonna go up to filter blur box Blur, and I'm gonna set it toe something fairly low, like nine pixels. It's fine and hit. OK, okay, Now that we have the direct shadow created, we're gonna start creating the base shadow. Now, as you remember from our previous videos, we learn that obey shadow occurs Any place where our object is making contact with the ground, we can see that there are four legs on this figurine and each of those legs gonna contact the ground, meaning that we're gonna have four based shadows. Then we're gonna start with just one leg. The first thing I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to my layers panel and create a new layer for my base shadow. I'm gonna go ahead and rename its face shadow, and I'm gonna automatically set this to multiply. The last thing I'm gonna do is set a color for this layer. I'm gonna right click and just choose one of colors. This is gonna help me for organizational purposes later. So now I can go ahead and start building my base shadow. I'm gonna go up to the elliptical marquee tool and create a shadow just by eye right under the first leg here. And I think I think this looks pretty good. I'm gonna go ahead and fill it with my shadow color, and the last thing I want to do is give it some blurs. I'm gonna go up to filter, blur, blur more. And if I don't think that's enough, remember that I can always go to filter and just select the first line item, which is Blur Mauritz. The last filter reapply. That's gonna give it some extra blur. And I think that's pretty good. So now holding down option or Ault, I'm gonna drag out duplicates of this base shadow and place them under each foot. And I'm not too worried about how it looks popping out because it's so close to the surface that I actually like the way It kind of looks uneven when it's resting there. So I think that's fine. And then right about there, I think that looks pretty good. And as you can see in our layers panel, the layer color is being inherited every time we make a copy. So the next shadow is an Ambien shadow. I'm gonna start with one of our base shadows, so I'm gonna actually press option or old and drag out a copy of our base shadow. And I'm gonna go over to our layers panel and just double click this layer and rename it Ambient Shadow. And I'm also going to right click and give us a different color. Now, using the techniques we've used in the previous videos, I'm going to give this a motion blur by going to filter, blur motion blur. And I'm gonna set this relatively small to about 30. 31. Looks pretty good. I'm gonna select. Okay. And now I'm going to give us a box blur by going up to filter blur inbox blur, and I'll change the setting a little bit lower and six looks pretty good, so I'll click. OK, now I'm gonna move this layer underneath one of the feet, and I like how that looks. This layer might be a little too dark, so we can actually soften it. I'm gonna go over to my layers panel and go up to a passage e and just click on the word opacity and scrubbed down until I think it looks good. I'm gonna start low and I work my way back up. I think that looks pretty good. We have a capacity setting of 68. Now I'm going to drag out a copy of my ambient shadow and place one under each of the other foot just like we did with the base shadows. I'm gonna zoom out just so we can kind of see what's going on here. I think this is looking pretty good. Now, if you remember from our observation videos, we talked about objects creating Indian shadows on surfaces as they got closer to that surface. If we can picture the midsection of our elephant figurine as getting close to the ground plane, then we can assume that there's going to be another ambient shadow right beneath this elephant. As this midsection is close enough to the ground plane to cause an Ambien shadow. So the way I'm gonna do that is going my layers panel Create a brand new layer and I'm gonna double click this and I'm gonna call this large Ambien shadow. And now, with my lips tool, I'm gonna go ahead and drag out a relatively large shadow that covers the base of our elephant And I'm gonna go ahead and fill this with our shadow color and using the same technique that we've used with every other ambient shadow. I'm gonna go to filter, blur, motion blur and give us a very high setting. 1 76 looks pretty good. And I'm gonna next go to filter, blur inbox Blur. And I'm gonna give us a high setting as well. That looks pretty good. Click OK, And right now it looks a little dark. So I'm gonna go over to the layers panel and make sure that the layer is set to multiply and then reduce the opacity all the way down. Let's start with zero and then work our way back up. Teoh 32 looks pretty good. Now. I think we can actually add one additional larger ambient shadow. I'm gonna do that by option or all clicking my large shadow and dragging out a copy. I'm gonna go ahead and actually press command or control t so I can stretch it out a little bit. I kind of want this Ambien shadow to go across the entire length of the elephant. I'm gonna hit return and let's go ahead and give us a little bit more blur, filter, Blur a lot. Another box blur. 2025 Looks pretty good and I'll hit Okay and I'll go ahead. Just position this underneath are figuring and that's looking pretty good. We're getting some really good depth in our shadows, but I still think we can do a little bit more. Where are figurines? Legs are making contact with the ground. We're gonna zoom in so we can see this a little better. I'm gonna drag out a copy of one of the base shadows, so I'm going over to the layers panel and select one of the base shadows and dragon into the new layer icon to create a duplicate. I'll go ahead and right, click it and change the color so we don't get confused with the others and then rename this ambient 02 and hit return. Now let's go ahead and see what we're working with here is our new shadow. I'm gonna go ahead and make this and much softer shadow that we're gonna place around the feet. So to do this I'm going to start by adding emotion, blur, filter, blur, motion blur. And I'm gonna set the setting pretty high. That might be a little too high. Let's bring it down a little bit. I think, uh, that looks pretty good. We'll stick with 85 hit, OK, And then now I'm gonna go to filter Blur Box Blur, and we'll set this a little lower 10 looks pretty good. So I'm gonna click, OK, I'm gonna go ahead and position this underneath one of the legs, but it's going to be just offset a little bit. So I think right about there looks pretty good. And looking at the shadow, it does look a little dark. So what I'm gonna do is drop the opacity down. I'm gonna go to the layers panel and go up to a pass iti and just scrub it down and play with it until I find something that works. 28 looks good, so we'll keep it at 28. American option or halt. Drag out duplicates of the shadow and place them on the outside of all of the legs. And that one doesn't get one. And I would actually do the same thing with the inside. So I'm gonna do drag out another duplicate of the shadow. But instead of placing on the outside, we're gonna place it on the inside. There we go. And because this backlog is hidden, we don't need a added to that. And I think that looks pretty good. Let me zoom out. You can definitely see the depth in the shadows around each of the legs and really get a sense of how the shadows play off one another for a very convincing effect. We'll take a look at another lighting scenario in the next video 11. Shadow Demo - Soft Lighting Scenario: All right, Here's a scene where we have some existing shadows that we're gonna try to match on this mug layer here. I'm gonna also be showing you a new technique on how to create the soft shadows in the scene. Now, at the end, I'll share a bonus technique with you not related to shadows. A couple things we can observe with the existing shadows is that the shadows are going to be pretty soft in our scene. Also, if we take a closer look, we can see some clear based shadows occurring around the base of each mug. And if I look over here to the bag and we can see some base shadows happening here as well , let me zoom out. Now, despite the shadows not having a clear shape, we can actually still use the shape for a mug to help us get started with the first shadow , which is going to be the direct shadow. So the first thing I'm gonna dio is use option or alter on a PC and drag out a copy of my mug layer. The next thing I want to do is to give us a color for the shadow and in this case, we can actually sample color from our scene. In order to select the color, I'm gonna go over and select the foreground color swatch that's gonna pop open my color picker. Now I can go over and select one of the colors in the shadow. Now it's showing us a light tan color. I actually want to choose a little bit darker of a color, so I'm gonna drag this straight down so we can get a darker tan, dark brown color and click. OK, so now that we have a shadow color selected, let's go ahead and apply that to our layer. I'll go over to my layers panel and double click the layer toe, open up the layer styles. I'm gonna select color overlay and then, in order to change this color to our color that we just elected, I'm going to select the color swatch here and it's go over and click on the foreground color in my toolbar, and that's gonna set the color to the one that we want. I'll select okay and hit OK again. And now you can see that we have the layer in that shadow color. I'm gonna go back to my layers panel and right click it and click on Rast Arise, Layer Style. And that's just apply that layer style directly to the layer so we don't have to worry about that again. Now I'll select this to multiply, and I'm gonna go ahead and remove the handle here because we won't need it for the shadow. I'll go over to the toolbar. It's like my pen tool. Let me zoom in and I'm just gonna make a selection using my pen tool. It's like make selection hit, OK, and just command or control X to get rid of that. Now I'll go ahead and transform this shadow by present Commander Control T and just skew the shape and adjust it so that it sits as if it's an actual shadow casting on the ground. I think that looks pretty good. I'm gonna hit return to commit the transformation, and I noticed that the shadow is still on top of our mug layers, so I'm gonna go over to the layers panel and just drop that down below the mug layer. Now, at this point, we're gonna do something different in order to mimic the effect of the soft shadows that we see on the left side of our seen on these mugs. Over here, we're gonna use a blur gallery filter called tilt shift. So I'm gonna go up to filter, blur gallery and select tilt shift. And you know what? Before I do that, let me explain really quickly how this works. Okay, on this scene, we have a simple grid. I'm gonna go to filter, blur gallery and select tilt shift, and you'll see we have a couple handles that have popped up on the scene. So the way this works is that anything in between these 1st 2 handles is going to be 100% in focus, and then you have the next two handles. Now, between these two lines is where are blurring is going to be taking effect. It starts from zero down here all the way to whatever value we have set to the dotted line and from the dotted line on its that consistent value. So we get this blurring Grady in effect, and the value can actually be set up here in the tilt shift window underneath the blur tools. Okay, now that we're back in our scene. Let's go ahead and apply that same technique to this shadow. I'll go to Filter Blur Gallery until shift. Let me zoom out here. As you can see, we have the tilt shift handles up. What I can do is I can grab this handle here and actually rotate the direction of the tilt shift. The next thing I wanna do is select the middle handle that allows me to drag my tilt shift . And what I'm looking for is to place these two handles, which I can move freely so that my shadow is in between them. That means that my shadow will start over here with zero blur, and then as it moves along toward the dotted line, it's going to increase in blur amounts. Let me zoom in so we can see that better. I'm gonna go up here and adjust on these values. Let's increase the blurring amount, and we can also increase or decrease the distortion and watch. What happens is I decrease the distortion. We can see that around the top of the blur, it starts to feather out more. Someone should change, he's saying. Is still something that looks good Basically, what I'm doing is I'm just adjusting the values until I get something that I think will work. And I think that looks pretty good. I'm gonna click, OK to commit that and I can do one more step. I'm gonna transform this really quick and just squish it a little bit. It might be a little too wide, so I'm gonna add one additional step to that. I think that looks pretty good. This is all by I We can see that it's pretty dark. Now. I'm guessing that once I change the opacity, I'm gonna get something close to this. Now, one thing I want to do really quick is to kind of blend the top of the shadow a little bit more than it is. And I can do that with a mask. So I'm gonna add a new layer mask and using my brush tool, I'm gonna actually increase the size of my brush tool and decrease the hardness of it. So we get a nice soft stroke. Now, with a mass tool, I can use black and white to either hide or reveal my layer. And if I paint with black, I can make a stroke. And what that's going to do is hide a part of that top of my shadow. Just so it makes it a little soft, I think looks pretty good. The last thing I want to do is to reduce the opacity of this layer. So I'm gonna go back to my layers panel, just move the opacity down until it looks pretty good, and I think that might work. I think that looks pretty good. The next step is to create the base shadow. And we're gonna do that following the same technique we've learned. And that's to use our elliptical marquee tool and to go down and make a selection of our base. And I think that looks like a pretty good selection. So with our mug layer selected a press command or control see in command actual V to copy and paste that selection onto a new layer, and this will be our base layer. Now I'm going to give this the shadow color. I'm gonna go over two layers panel and double click it toe. Open up the layer styles and I will select color overlay and it should be set to the color that we previously selected, so I'll click. OK, now I can go over and right, click my layer and go to pasteurized layer style just to apply that layer style permanently . And I'll double click my layer and name this a shadow. I'll go ahead and move this directly below my mug layer and change it to multiply. Now I'm going to filter, blur and do a blur more filter and that's just going to give it a nice soft edge. I might want to do that one more time and now that looks pretty good. So we'll go ahead and just position this directly underneath our mug. I can always use Commander Control T to transform this so that it sits a little better, and I think that looks pretty good. Now I'm gonna check my other mug on the scene just to see if it looks about right. And I do see this line here, and it kind of follows the line that we created, so I think that's looking pretty good. Now, the next shadow we're gonna create is the ambient shadow in the first step. To create the ambient shadow for this mug is to make a duplicate copy of our base shadow. And now what I'm going to dio is follow the same technique that we've used previously. And I'm going to start by adding a motion blur. So I'll go to filter, blur motion blur. Now, because of the lighting in this scene, everything is really soft. So Miami in Shadow is going to be pretty soft, which means that I need a pretty high motion blur. So crank this up, let me get this out the way so I can see it. I think 92 works, So let's go with that. I'll click OK, and I'll go to filter, Blur and add the box blur and let me crank this up a little bit. 19 looks pretty good. We'll select. Okay, so there is our Ambien shadow. Now, what I need to do is to place this under a month, so I'm gonna have to move it under our mug, and that looks pretty good. But one thing I noticed over here on the mugs in our scene is that there's not a lot of ambient shadow occurring around the base of the mug on the left side, with a light is hitting its actually mawr off to the right side in this area. So I'm gonna mimic that by pressing commander control tea on my keyboard, and that allows me to bring up the transformation handles. Now we can actually skew my ambient shadow so that it brings that shadow out a little more from my mug. I think that looks pretty good. So I'm gonna select enter to commit the transformation, And I'm gonna use my Eric. He's just to nudge this down a little bit. Okay? The last thing I could do with Sami and Shadow is to change the opacity. I'm gonna go over to my layers panel and move the opacity down. Let's take it all the way down to 30% looks good, and I'll double click the layer and rename this Gambian shadow. Okay, I think that's looking pretty good, but the one thing I did notice is that there seems to be a little bit of a darker shadow underneath where the handle sticks out on both of our mugs that exist in the scene already . And over here on our mug, we can see if the countertop is pretty clean. So I want to kind of mimic the effect of our handle being close enough to the countertop here to cast Anami and shadow. So I'm going over to my layers panel and select the base shadow and just drag out a copy of that. And now I'm going to go up to filter Blur and give this a motion blur, and we'll increase this a little bit. I think that looks fine. I'm gonna go back and go to filter, blur box blur. And again, I'm looking for this to be really, really soft. So I'm increase the box player radius as well and select. Okay. Now, using commander Control T, I'm gonna bring up the transformation handles and just kind of squish this shadow a little bit and move this right underneath our handle. I think that looks pretty good. And I'm a hit enter to commit the transformation. I'm gonna go back over to my layers panel. DoubleClick doesn't rename this ambient handle, and I'm gonna reduce the opacity down to something like 30%. Looks good. Now, let's zoom out and take a look at our scene. Now, at this point, I can see clearly that our shadows are actually a little too dark so we can go back to our layers panel to make some adjustments to the shadows. So we're gonna start with our direct shadow, which we never named. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that right now, and I'm gonna reduce the opacity just a little bit more. I think that looks pretty good. And I'm gonna go over to my Ambien shadow, and I think I can actually reduce the size of this even more right there. And that's something else that I wanted to point out. That really is no exact formula on creating shadows That's going to give you the right shadow every time. A lot of it is just seeing what works and making changes as you go. And now I promised you a bonus technique. The one thing that can really sell this effect is if we add a reflection like the other mugs have, and we can do that fairly quickly. And I want to show you a technique that I like to use when our reflections are pretty simple and non descript. So the first thing I wanna do is go to my layers panel and select my mug layer and click option or all to drag out a copy of my mud and we're gonna skew this mug so that it's upside down and stretch it out pretty significantly and that looks pretty good. I'm gonna go ahead and enter to commit the transformation. And now to give it that same effect that we see the reflections on these monks have. I'm gonna go up to filter, blur and give it a small amount of motion blur. But I'm gonna make sure that the angle is straight up and down and let's reduce the amount of the blur. I think that looks pretty good. I'm gonna go ahead hit. Okay? The last thing I'm gonna do is go to filter, Blur and at just a small amount of box blur as well. I have it set to four pixels and that looks pretty good else. Look, OK, And now we'll move this layer just underneath the mug about here, and I'm gonna go to my layers panel to make some or adjustments. Let's go ahead and rename this and call this reflection, and we'll set the blend mode to multiply and will drag this layer below our mug layer. Now we can reduce the opacity while we just sit down really low. Only 20 and I must have to bring it back up just a little bit until we can barely see it. And I think that looks pretty good. And back in our canvas, I'm gonna make some final adjustments to the position of this. And there we go. Now I can see that the mug actually carries off past the table. So we see that we have some extra pixels down here that we don't need from the layer. So I'm gonna go ahead and remove those under that fairly quickly by by going up to my rectangular marquee tool and selecting the area of the mug that I want And with the selection active, if I go over to my layers panel and select the add layer mask icon, it will automatically mask out everything except for what was in this election. Now, the last thing to finish this off is to add a small amount of blur to our layer mask. Currently, we have a very hard line right at this corner. But as the reflection hits the corner, it's gonna kind of taper off. So we want toe mimic that effect by blurring our mask. I'm gonna do that by going to filter, blur and out at a small amount of box blur. And I think that's fine. I'm gonna select. Okay, and that's it. That should be our final scene. So we were able to successfully use the existing shadows and are seen for information on how to rebuild our own shadows to make our own object appear as if it's actually in the scene. In our next video, we'll be taking a look at some new techniques, creating shadows using only layer styles. 12. Shadow Demo - Top-Down Perspective Scenario: Okay, here's one last scene that we're gonna take a look at. As you can see, we're looking straight down at our scene, which gives us a completely different look at the shadows. Now, even though we may not be able to use the previous techniques exactly, we can still adapt what we've learned into a scenario like this. In fact, because we are doing a top down perspective, it does give us an opportunity to use layer styles in order to create realistic shadows. And that's what will attempt to do with this layer here. As you can see, I've already cropped out this bull and let me go ahead, just move it into a position that looks a little more aesthetic. Now, before we begin, I do want to make a couple observations about the existing shadows in the scene. We can see that they're all soft shadows. So that's exactly what we're going to try to recreate in our layer styles. First thing I want to do is go over to the layers panel and I'm gonna double click are layer to bring open the layer styles panel. And now I'm gonna add a drop shadow once this is selected. I'm allowed to adjust the properties over here. The first thing I want to do is adjust the color. So if I select this swatch, we already know that shadows aren't pure black, so we're gonna select a different color. Something with a dark blue, I think will work just fine. And that looks pretty good. I'm gonna select. Okay, At this point, I wanna go right down to my opacity, and I might make an adjustment here later, but we can take it down for now, just a little bit. And one thing I want to point out about working with Blair styles is that some of the layer styles allow you to manipulate your layer style on the campus and directly. And what I mean by that is I can click and drag my drop shadow at any time and move it anywhere I want. So this is a really cool interactive feature. I'm just gonna position it. I think this looks pretty good. And now I'm going to increase the softness of the shadow by going down to the size property . And as I drag the slider up, we can see on a canvas that the shadow starts to get fuzzier, and I'm actually gonna crank this all the way up, and I think that looks pretty good now. It's important to point out here that the values I'm using are strictly relative to the size of my document. That means depending on the pixel dimensions of your document, different settings might work better for you. So right now we have a very soft ambient shadow, and I'm looking at the rest of my shows and I can see that it's it's we moved us all the way. I can see that it gets kind of dark that the closer it is to our object. Now I want to point out that this Boulis sitting higher off the table than, say, the night for the greenery over here. So this is going to be a guessing game. Previously, I mentioned that when setting the blend mode of a shadow using multiply was preferred. Occasionally you may find that linear burn gives you just a little bit more richness in the shadow, and I'm seeing that here, so I'm actually gonna keep linear burn as my blend mode, and we can see that giving us a nice, darker color. It's blending much better with the wood grain than the multiply blending bullet waas. Okay, I think that's good. Now what I want to do is actually at a second shadow. I've mentioned before that I like to build my shadows. It gives more depth. Very rarely have I found that you can accomplish a realistic shadow with only using a single shadow. So if I want to add a second drop shadow, I can do that by going to the drop shadow layer and clicking this plus icon here. And that's just gonna introduce another shadow with the exact same settings. Now we can see what it did. It made it much darker, but I'm gonna go over to my properties and make some additional adjustments. So for this shadow, I do want it to be much softer. So I'm gonna bring the capacity way down, and I'm gonna click and drag it out so I can see where it looks like so you can see that shadow moving around the screen. So let's position it out just a little further, and I think that looks pretty good. I can always go over to my layer of style panel and click the check mark to hide or reveal the shadow. This still may appear little darks. Let me bring this down a little bit more. Okay, Now what I'm trying to look at is the shadow right up against the bowl compared to say, the knife over here or maybe even the greenery over here. And I'm starting to see that same wood grain pop in that same darkness. So I'm thinking that looks pretty good. The last thing I want to do is actually adjust the size, and I'm gonna bring this down a little bit. Right now, it's a little too soft, and I want to get some more definition on my shadow because this is essentially going to be my direct shadow, except it's gonna be a softer direct shadow. So let me bring this back up a little bit to give it a little more blur. And I think that's looking pretty good. And at any time I could go back and forth between the two shadows and make changes as necessary. As I said before, working with Shadows is not an exact science. It's more of a fluid process. Where you make a lot of adjustments and kind of see what works to your eye. I'm gonna click, OK? And I think that about does it for the Shadow and that's it. There's really not much to it. You know, With just a few layer styles, we were able to recreate some realistic shadows and are seen. 13. Conclusion & Project: thank you for taking this class. Hopefully have a better understanding of the different shadows that can exist in this scene and are better equipped to create professional level shadows in your own scenes. I encourage you to complete the project for this class. You'll be asked to create a mini photo composite using the techniques we've learned. Once you've finished, please post them in the gallery. I'd like to see how they turned out again. Thank you. And good luck.